Church Video Ideas

I’m am now back in good ‘ol Dallas. As I reflect upon my time in Nashville, many thoughts come to mind. Here goes:

• Staying with and hanging out with my best friend, Thomas, and his wife Dita. We played Nintendo Wii each night until about 3am. Good times! The Tiger Woods golf game on Wii is amazing! Thomas is the worship leader at Mosaic Nashville, where I went to church Sunday morning and night. It was also nice to eat twice with their pastor, Gary. God is doing some cool things at Mosaic Nashville. I’ve visited several times, so it’s been cool to see them grow and watch what God is doing in their community. If you’re in town, give them a visit.
• Seeing one of my friends from when I lived in Washington DC, who now lives in Nashville. Hanging out with Sarin (and his soon-to-be wife, Rebecca) was a true treat. Sarin is an amazing artist and is working on some very cool projects. We got to eat a couple of times together, catch some movies and he also played electric guitar at Mosaic Nashville on Sunday.
• Getting to hang out with and share many meals with Kirk Longhofer of Wichita, Kansas.
• Having lunch with Bill Seaver of MicroExplosion.
• Hanging out some with the crew from SermonSpice, my sponsor for my classes.
• Getting to speak with the Tech Directors of and hear about what’s going on at the following churches: Bellevue in Memphis, Brentwood Baptist, First Baptist Orlando and First Baptist Jacksonville, FL. Though my church is Non-denominational, I grew up Southern Baptist and have visited these churches before and know of their long history. It’s intriguing to me to see God doing a new thing at these long-standing churches that are trying to change and move forward. According to THIS article on Monday Morning Insight, 90% of churches are in decline.
• Meeting and speaking with some of the staff and key leaders at LifeWay.
• Seeing many Bent Tree members who were at NRB, including our pastor, Pete Briscoe, who was doing a meet and greet for his radio show: Telling the Truth.
• Catching a few classes at NRB. My favorite was my friend, Phil Cooke’s class on branding. He said a lot that is in his new book “Branding Faith“, which I’ve been reading the manuscript of for the last few months. It’s a great read and I’ll review it once I finish it. It was cool to see the actual hardcopy-version of his book. I encourage you to order a copy.
• Walking around the Exhibit Hall and meeting new people/companies, collecting free pens (something I enjoy) and doing a radio interview with a Jewish Ministry. The guy who works for the ministry used to be a tech director in San Antonio, TX and reads my blog. I’ll post a link to the interview when it’s ready.
• My biggest highlights were meeting some of you, regular readers of my blog, who came up and introduced yourself to me. It is so cool to look someone in the eyes, who has been commenting on your blog. I love it!
• Another highlight was my 2 classes that I spoke in. Here is a quick summary of what stuck out to me from the classes I spoke in:
  1. Large or small, every church has struggles/challenges and is constantly seeking to grow their ministry. I got to talk with people from very small churches to mega-mega-mega churches. It was humbling and amazing to meet fellow tech directors and be able to offer some of my philosophy of ministry and leadership.
  2. My class called “On the Air: Ten Attributes of a Winning Team” was filled with people that are broadcasting on television. I was absolutely shocked and floored that out of everyone of them that was on TV, none of them had a weekly rehearsal. Their first service was a rehearsal and they couldn’t imagine asking volunteers to come out to rehearsal during the week. I begged them to read my blog. You know how I love talking about leading volunteers!
  3. In my class, “The Ultimate Q & A”, where the panel just took random classes from the attendees, I got to share my philosophy on being and hiring “equippers” versus “doers”. I shared that leaders are to equip (based on the Ephesians 4 model). It seemed to strike a nerve and was something I believe God wanted me to share about. At Bent Tree, our leaders (whether volunteer or paid) are equippers.
  4. The major “God-moment” was during the “On the Air” class when I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to say the following, “Stop trying to revive what God is trying to kill.” Some gasped, some cried, some clapped, some said, Amen!”, some sat in silence. I have no doubt that God wanted me to say that and that it spoke right to someone’s (I don’t know who) situation. I’m amazed at the number of churches that have had a TV broadcast for years and never evaluate why they do it and if they should continue to.
  5. Below are some pictures of other highlights, including great food I consumed in Nashville:
     
     
• EXTRA:
  Yes, President Bush spoke at NRB, but no I did not get to see him. I missed it.

Many have asked what we’re doing as far as media in our new worship center. As I mentioned before, we are using EasyWorship as our presentation software. We are also slowly changing over our entire campus (all venues) to EasyWorship, which has a universal site license (other products such as MediaShout and ProPresenter charge extra to use their software on multiple computers). We have 7 venues that will be using EasyWorship, so the universal site license was a win for us.

My friends at EasyWorship were great during the crazy weeks and days leading up to our first worship service. Either we (Bent Tree) are the first church to use EasyWorship in an HD setting or we are one of the first - either way: we won’t be the last. I’ve heard rumors of confusion about whether or not EasyWorship can do HD. Let me set the record straight: it does and we’re doing it.

The trouble that we were having leading up to the first service was due to having the wrong video card. I went locally and purchased a new video card (NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS) and we were up and running in a matter of minutes. If you have any other questions about the initial setup of EasyWorship and the codecs I purchased/downloaded, just email me.

Here’s what’s up as far as the HD backgrounds we used. We’ve had 3 Sundays in our new worship center. The first Sunday we used all Igniter Backs Vol. 3 backgrounds (loops and stills). The next week we used more Igniter Backs and some brand new backgrounds from FortyOneTwenty. This past Sunday we used new HD backgrounds from SermonVideos.com.

I’d like to point out that I still encourage our volunteers that pick the backgrounds each week to use at least one still background for a song. As I’ve said before, motion backgrounds are most powerful in contrast to still backgrounds. You can read more on my philosophy of this in my “Less Is More” article.

EXTRA:
Still looking for FREE worship backgrounds? Check out HERE.

BONUS:
Yesterday we found our opening video to kick off our Easter service. It’s available at BlueFish.tv, it’s pretty sweet and it’s $1.99! Check it out HERE.

I know several people that are coming to Dallas this week for the C3 Conference at Fellowship Church. I’m planning to meet with a few of them and give them a tour of Bent Tree. If you’re coming to town this week and want to get together, just shoot me an email and let me know: greg@churchvideoideas.com.

EXTRA:
We have a team of leaders from our church in Pune, India training Church leaders for our adopted people group, the Marathas. This past Sunday we spoke with one of our elders live during our Sunday morning worship service. It was about 9pm his time and it was morning for us. It was very cool. We could all hear him clear as a bell and he heard us with no problem. We did it using Skype!

EXTRA, EXTRA:

According to TechCrunch yesterday, a source close to Microsoft says the company will launch a new desktop software called WorldWide Telescope on February 27. Pretty cool. You can read more about it HERE.

BONUS:
I read this in WIRED magazine: You can place a picture of you and/or your family on the moon - that’s right: on the moon. Check out HERE for more info.

FYI - There has been some great discussion and comments on the frequency post, as well as the team leadership post. Go back and check them out. As far as the “Firing a Volunteer” post, I’ve been thinking about the whole refining of a team (this applies to any team at your church, not just the tech team).

I’ll probably turn this into a future article, but for now, here’s what I’m dealing with in my ministry. There are a couple of very talented and skilled people that say or imply things like “I want to do _____” or I don’t think I’m going to serve. Or “I’m going to do ______ or I quit.” - that type of thing. These aren’t people that I’m ready to “fire”. They definitely have some heart/attitude issues that need to be addressed, but the firing of the individual I mentioned last week was well beyond that.

As I’ve said before and will say again: ministry is people and people come in all shapes, sizes and personalities. Every church has them - the team members that you have to spend more time with than others, the ones that you have to have plenty of communication with, meetings with to discuss something they’ve said or done, extra coffees, breakfasts or lunches to get to know them better and allow them to get to know your heart better.

Thank God these people don’t make up the majority of your team (at least they don’t for me), but they do exist on each team. Though they can be frustrating and challenging, I do take a step back every now and then and see how God is using me and our technical ministry to shape and mold them into a person more like Christ. These difficult people are prime opportunities for growth and with the proper leadership will one day turn into model team members. I’ve seen it time and time again.

My number one request of myself, my staff, and my volunteers is that we are teachable. You don’t have to get it right every time, you don’t have to know it all - just be teachable. That’s all I’m looking for. I have a TON of grace for someone that’s teachable.

SIDEBAR:
Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” A while back I was going to make that comment its own blog post. I can’t tell you how many times one of you has emailed me to ask a question and my response has been something like, “I honestly don’t know, but here’s someone who might…”. If you’ve ever heard that from me before, you know I’m telling the truth. If you don’t know something, just admit it and either give the task, question or project to someone that does or commit to learn it and let God stretch you.
SIDEBAR END

THE LESSON:
So - back to refining the team. Some things are constant, friends.

• You will always (and I mean always) need to be constantly recruiting and training new team members. Team members leave or step down all the time for various reasons. You must work hard and constantly to see that your team has depth - I can’t stress this enough.
• You will always need to keep attitudes in check. My boss calls it “keeping a short account”. If someone has an attitude on Sunday, we are meeting on Monday - it’s that simple. Don’t allow things to fester and go on without accountability.
• You will always need to be in communication with your team. Whether it be in person, phone calls, or emails - you should be touching base with your team regularly. Send them random thoughts, praises, dreams, goals, devotionals, stories of what God is doing at your church (often they don’t get to hear the stories that you do).
• You will always need to be growing personally, spiritually and professionally. You are their leader. They look to you for wisdom, discernment, guidance, vision and shepherding. You’ve got to stay on your knees (I’m talking to myself, too). You’ve got to stay in the Word (I’m really preaching to myself now). You’ve got to ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and discernment, which God’s Word tells us He will give to those that ask (Proverbs 2:1-11 and James 1:5). You also should be reading. I encourage you to always be reading some type of book on leadership. If you can’t buy it, go to the Library and check one out.

Here’s what I’d love for you to comment on: What is one or some of your favorite books on leadership?

EXTRA:
If you haven’t heard, yet: Granger Community Church is going multi-campus. Check out Pastor Mark Beeson’s announcement HERE.

EXTRA, EXTRA:
For an update on my blog post “Blu-Ray It Is”, you can read the latest HERE.

BONUS:
To mi amigo, Mark, who requested more links to free stuff. I do still link to free media downloads as I come across them. I try to list the ones that people wouldn’t come across on their own. If you’re just looking for any free stuff, click on my “Blog Sponsors” tab above and go to each of the sponsors websites. Most of them have a monthly free download. HERE’S a FREE download you may not know of.

I don’t know what it’s like at your church, but at mine, we (my Audio Coordinator and myself) are constantly having to battle with frequency coordination throughout our campus. I’ve said from day one - I’ve never seen a church with so many wireless mics. Every classroom, every venue, you name it - it’s got wireless mics. This isn’t by choice - I inherited this.

Since our campus is under reconstruction, we had to move the children’s ministry from the Children’s Building over to the Education Building. When we did that, the kids’ ministry brought over their mics from their building, but they clashed with the existing mics in the E-building and canceled each other out. It has become a huge project to coordinate our campus (this involves my team, several different types of software, a scanner we just purchased, Clark ProMedia and a professional frequency coordinator from Florida who scanned our entire campus for all RF activity).

Across the street from us is a small church called Prestonwood (a church of over 20,000). People come to visit Bent Tree and everyone says, “Wow - Prestonwood is literally across the street.” Each time I say, “Yep, there it is.” We had to talk with their engineering team (yes, they have an Engineering Department) and coordinate our frequencies with each other. They had 3 professional RF guys on site when I called and were working on the same thing.
Yesterday, we learned that the 10 wireless mics we had set aside for our new kids’ theater won’t work after January ‘09, due to the ongoing bidding of wireless bands. Are you guys keeping up with all this? It’s huge and the Church doesn’t even have a voice in the decision - it’s all about money and churches can’t compete with what these companies are bidding. My Audio Coordinator talked with Shure yesterday and their guy told him to not even bother with writing letters - money talks, plain and simple.

Take a look HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE for more info if this is news to you. If you are keeping up with this, I’d love to hear your thoughts, observations, plans, ideas, etc. When we ordered our new microphone package for our new worship center, I ordered a wired mic for every wireless mic. I wanted to make sure we could do everything we do - just in case. FYI - All of our new wireless mics in our new worship center are Shure UHF-Rs. How are you future-proofing your church?

As I mentioned before, in preparation for our new worship center and moving from 2 cameras to 3, I’ve been visiting other churches to get ideas and inspiration. The last 2 Sundays I’ve visited churches via the internet. I’ve attended both LifeChurch.tv’s and Seacoast’s Internet Campuses. It’s been fascinating to watch and worship via the web. If you get a chance one Sunday and can sneak away into your office, log on and check ‘em out.

EXTRA:

I’ve got to give another shout out to my friend, Shawn Wood (Experiences Pastor at Seacoast), for linking to this video. I can’t imagine Burger King without the whopper. If you want to see what it would be like, check it out HERE.

ADDITION:

I accidentally forgot to mention this year’s Christmas product from Radiate Films in yesterday’s post. It has been added now and I encourage you to check it out below.

We are coming upon the time at my church when we have to give up all our “Owner Provided” equipment, so they can be installed in our new worship center. We have some current equipment that we’re not going to use in the new building and will be selling. We’re getting rid of stuff like 2 Mackie 56 channel consoles, 1 Yamaha M-3000A (that we use for our monitor board) and our Clark 3-way splits. Maybe you have need of some of the above - just let me know. Email me at greg@churchvideoideas.com.

Today is my last day at work this week! I’m off Wednesday through Saturday. Gonna get me some smoked turkey.

EXTRA:

Want to see something wild? Check out my guest blog on Church Marketing Sucks HERE.

Before I tell you why I blog, let me start with how I got into blogging. A little over a year ago my friend, Don Chapman of WorshipIdeas.com, was visiting me in Dallas. I was driving to Oklahoma City to speak at a conference and Don came with me. It was about a 3 hour drive and I started sharing some ideas, resources and new companies that I had come across. Don directly and boldly said, “Dude, you have got to start blogging. Church leaders would really benefit from what you’re sharing with me.”

Not only that, that night Don went online to GoDaddy and bought the domain name: ChurchVideoIdeas.com and said, “Here you go. Now get to blogging!” I started a cheesy-looking WordPress blog and the rest is history. Thanks to my great “Charter Sponsors“, I was able to give my blog a face-lift via Kent and his team at Bombay Creative.

The “why” is simple. I have a heart for the Church (capital “C”). My heart and passion is for the Kingdom and equipping Church leaders - that’s why I write, that’s why I consult, that’s why I speak at conferences. I love Christ’s Bride and want to be a friend, helper, encourager and equipper to Church leaders around the world. Praise God, people actually care what I have to say. According to Google Analytics, thousands of Church leaders from around the world read and share this blog each week. That, to me, is surprising, shocking and extremely humbling. Almost every day I receive an email from a Church leader asking me a question and many of you reading this, who have sent me an email, hopefully have seen that I try to answer your email promptly and to the best of my knowledge.

The truth is: I don’t know it all. I don’t even come close. I just share what I’ve learned on my journey and if I think someone else can answer your question better, I point you in their direction. What would I like to change? I’d love to see more interaction on this blog. More of you making comments. There are a couple each day, but I can see (via my tracker) that a ton of you are reading this blog, but apparently not commenting. I always try to pose some type of question and ask for your feedback, ideas and I sincerely want to hear what you’re doing in your own ministry setting.

SO, with that being said… I’m glad Don talked me into blogging, I’m grateful to God for the sponsors that make all this possible, I praise God that he’s given me a passion and desire to write something fresh each day and I’m humbled, honored and excited that you are reading this and we have this cool sort-of virtual connection. What a great time to be alive!

As always, I want to again mention that I love meeting you in real life, too. If you’re in Dallas, let me know. If we’re at the same conference, let me know. I’m consulting with 2 churches for the rest of ‘07 and hope to work with a few more of you in ‘08. So, to wrap up: Glad to be blogging. Glad you’re reading. Hope you’ll continue to. Hope you’ll comment and add to the discussion. Also, feel free to email me questions or suggestions of topics to blog about.

TechMission has just launched www.UrbanMinistry.org as a Web portal for the Urban Ministry world. Some of the sections you may be interested in include:

* UrbanMinistry Blogs: including some of the top syndicated Blogs of Urban Ministry leaders.
* Sermon Videos & MP3s including John Perkins, Jim Wallis, Noel Castellanos, Wayne Gordon, Ray Backke, Effrim Smith and Martin Luther King Jr.
* Gospelpedia: similar to Wikipedia but covering youth ministry, addiction recovery, technology and ministry and volunteer management.
* Conference Materials: including over 100 keynote talks and workshops from CCDA, Kingdomworks and Compassionworks/YouthPartnersNet (coming soon).
* Local Volunteer Opportunities: including over 1,500 volunteer opportunities from nearly 900 organizations. National partners on this site include: CCDA, UYWI, YouthPartnersNet, HLIC, Salvation Army and AGRM.
* Online Courses
* Account Registration (FREE)

EXTRA:

Cory Miller (from Church Communications Pro - and is also a part of my book) is offering people a coupon code to get Granger’s Church Communications Form Bundle for FREE. I have it and it’s great! You can get it HERE.

BONUS:

Yesterday, WorshipHouse Media launched their Thanksgiving and Christmas seasonal stores. Check them out for the best in seasonal media (new for this year and good stuff from earlier years).

Last week, in my weekly column for Monday Morning Insight, I wrote about Catalyst utilizing Web 2.0 technology throughout the conference. My friend, Bobby Gruenewald, in his Swerve blog, revealed how they did it. Below are his words:

At Catalyst, we built several interactive elements that promoted YouVersion.com in the general sessions. All of the applications utilized sms (text messaging), and we have been receiving phone calls every day this week from people asking about how we did that and where can they get it.

Here is a quick post to describe who/what we used and explain a little bit about the technology involved, and also get ideas/feedback from all of you.

1. What is SMS?

SMS or “Short Message Service” (wiki) allows you to send short (160 character) messages to and from mobile phones. SMS is often referred to as “texting”.

2. What did you do with texting at Catalyst (for those of you who were not there)?

* Thursday morning we introduced YouVersion.com and asked that people text Bible verses (ex. Hebrews 13:17) about leadership to a 5 digit number (it’s called a “shortcode”). We then displayed in real-time the full verses that were submitted on the screens in the arena.

* Thursday afternoon we had people text (a,b,c or d) to the shortcode to vote on which song was their favorite “reverb” song. We displayed the results and the band played that song.

* Friday morning we asked people to text words that they felt described Craig’s session. It could be a word that described how it made them feel, or a words that were “take away” words from the session. We then displayed a tag cloud of the words people submitted at the end of the session.

* Late Friday morning we asked people to text their names or email addresses if they were committing to pursue radical integrity and grace. It was in association with the Deadly Viper book that was launched at the conference.

3. How did you do it?

We worked with OpenMarket aka simplewire.com. They have connections to many of the cell phone carriers around the world and are able to send and receive SMS messages to each of those providers. They also provided our programmers with the ability to write web applications that connect to their services. Basically we wrote an application that would save all of the text messages to a database and in some cases respond to the user with a text message that told them more about YouVersion or asked them for more information. Additionally, we built a few flash applications that would query the database and display the information I described above to the audience in the arena.

4. How much does it cost?

It does require a financial investment to do it well. It really varies based on what you are trying to do, and it would be best to call the folks at simplewire to have them help you navigate through the costs of their service.

5. How long did it take to build?

It took our talented Digerati team a little over a week to build and test the various pieces of it once we had everything setup with simplewire.

6. Why didn’t you use Twitter or another “free” sms application?

Twitter is great…it just would not allow us to build the types of applications we built, and it has had some reliability challenges on top of that.
I am sure there are many other questions, but those are the main ones that we have been getting. I’d be happy to answer any other questions in the comments. We have additional plans to use the technology in our weekend experiences…but instead of telling you our plans, I’d love to hear what your thoughts/ideas would be for sms applications in the church. If you are already using it, I’d love to hear about that too!

*** I (Greg) will just add the same thing: If you’re using Web 2.0 technology and doing ministry via SMS apps, I’d love to hear about it, too. I’d also love for you to join my “Church 2.0″ group on Facebook HERE.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE:

The end of Heroes last night made my heart skip a beat. Good stuff. And YES, I realize I haven’t talked about the Cowboys since they lost.